Word: apollos
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...With a deafening bellow, the rocket inched upward on a rising pillar of smoke and flame, then spurted off into earth orbit. During its second turn around the planet, it accelerated from 17,400 m.p.h. to 24,200 m.p.h., enough to escape earth's gravitational embrace and send Apollo 8 on the road of night that would lead to the moon. Almost 69 hours after liftoff, the three astronauts made their historic rendezvous...
...mottled by large patches of white. Thus, incredibly, they were there, precisely where the mission planners had predicted, finally living the dreams of untold generations of their ancestors. In orbit around the moon and 230,000 miles farther away from home than any humans had ever before traveled, the Apollo 8 astronauts conveyed impressions of their pioneering adventure with words that at times were poetic. Their telecasts gave earthbound viewers an unforgettable astronaut's-eye view of the moon...
From their descriptions, it was obvious that the Apollo crew had diligently learned its lessons. The astronauts casually called out names of lunar craters and other landmarks as if they were old friends. The Sea of Fertility. Messier. Pickering. The Pyrenees Mountains. The craters of Colombo and Gutenberg. The long parallel cracks or faults of Gaudibert...
...Christmas Eve, during their ninth revolution of the moon, the astronauts presented their best description of the moon in the longest and most impressive of the mission's six telecasts. "This is Apollo 8 coming to you live from the moon," reported Borman, focusing the TV camera on the lunar surface drifting by below. "The moon is a different thing to each of us," said Borman. "My own impression is that it's a vast, lonely, forbidding-type existence-great expanse of nothing that looks rather like clouds and clouds of pumice stone. It certainly would not appear...
...Apollo spacecraft sped toward the terminator (the continually moving line that divides the day and night hemispheres of the moon), the sun dropped from directly overhead toward the horizon, lengthening shadows and bringing out more surface detail. Anders described a new crater with a well-defined ray of powdery material emanating from it. He observed that the Sea of Crises was "amazingly smooth as far as the horizon," which was visible on TV screens as a curved line about 325 miles from Apollo's route. One crater in the area, said Anders, "has strange circular cracks patterned around...